Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?

You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

Different people work different ways.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I'm supposed to.

He started to wonder if maybe they had been raptured while he was in school. He always worried the Lord would show up when he wasn't around. Or when he was on the toilet, taking care of a number two.

Anger is momentary madness so control your passion or it will control you.

People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.

If you leave me here," the guy on the floor said, "he'll kill me tomorrow morning." Parker looked at him. "So you've still got tonight," he said.

No plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy.

Democratic nation states remain far more capable of managing the circuit of coercion, taxation and legitimation than any transnational bodies.

I should have checked the price tag before I gave them my last name.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

I can't watch other people doing comedy. As soon as somebody starts being funny I have to turn off because it upsets me. I get comedy indigestion. I just hate anybody else being funny. That's my job.

We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.